Taking the Plunge or: Logic is Your Furry Friend
by FurryNemesis
Summary: A slightly different take on the Last Fight. Contains advanced prototypes, suicidal logic and a very angry Harry. Glue and batteries not included. Represents a choking hazard: not suitable for children under 3 years old.


Just a different take on the last fight. Done to death, I know but I had to do my own version. Usual disclaimer applies, and if there was actually any use in doing so I'd claim the plot and a couple of other elements too. The veil voices areinspired by / lifted from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books: All hail him for he keeps me from becoming knurd.

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In the end, it all comes down to sex. Sex, and blood. Or some combination of the two in their various guises as lust, love, violence, anger and all the rest. They are the elemental driving forces of the universe and try as one might, ultimately they can be neither stopped nor controlled – unless you happen to have an iron will and a mind made of steel.

I found out about the first fact when I lost my virginity to Hermione Granger.

I discovered the second when I duelled Voldemort in the summer after my last year at Hogwarts.

And the third? Well, the third rule is this:

Both combined can destroy everything and create it anew in an instant. The only difference is that the second time around, you'll have a future.

Just like me, in fact.

Just like her, too.

Unlike that bastard Riddle.

In the end, it was entirely academic. And logical. And, were it not for the very special circumstances laid out in Trelawney's prophecy, perfectly suicidal.

You see, Riddle had made the very great mistake of attacking the Ministry – again - to get to the Keeper of the Prophecies and force him to reveal what he knew about Trelawney's prediction. Which was of course precisely nil, seeing as myself and Dumbledore were the only ones who knew the entire thing.

Dumbledore went as soon as the alarm was raised and captured five Eaters by stealth and trickery before being locked out of the Veil Chamber into which I had followed Riddle moments before. I had refused to let Dumbledore go alone due to the fact that if only one of them came out of there, it wouldn't be him. Hermione, bless her little cotton suspenders - socks, socks, I meant socks. Really. – had been right. I _did_ have a saving-people thing. So I went and shut the door right in his beard. After all, now that it was down to the two of us – like it always should have been, really – there was only one thought going through my head, and that was whatever the prophecy said, the one who ended up dying would _not be me_.

Did I mention that at that point I was suicidally angry? That room brought back all the foulest memories of two and a half years ago and there was absolutely no question of letting him get out of there alive. There was only one little problem, and that was that he was, actually, far more knowledgeable than me when it came to illegal, dangerous and downright deadly curses. Avada Kedavra be damned, for the stuff he started throwing at me would have shredded my body from head to toe had I not been practicing six hours a day for two years solid.

Neither of us could get an advantage. My shields were too strong, my reflexes too fast for his Avada and his spellcasting far too fluid for me to return anything apart from the odd minor hex and curse, all of which missed. Deliberately. I couldn't let him know that I was fighting with a wand that wasn't my own, that wasn't the twin of his.

I needed to get him off balance, to make him think I was out of the fight. Problem was, once I'd made it seem like I'd been hit, chances were that he would just finish me there and then without grandstanding and giving me a chance to draw my _real_ wand and hex him to bits in the middle of his gloating.

You see, in order to prevent the _Priori Incantatem _effect from my fourth year, I'd been fighting with one of the new, very, _very _rare dual-core prototypes from Mr Ollivander - a recent discovery. Casting was faster, smoother, and more powerful than the old ones. My old Holly and Phoenix-feather wand was a wonderful model, of course, but this one felt less like a wand than an extension of my wrist.

The core was a single unicorn foal tail hair wrapped around what I _suspected_ was a cylindrical crystal of solidified Elixir of Life. Dumbledore and Ollivander had been whispering to each other like two pigeons in a loft for _weeks_ before they'd told me even the first bit. Of course, I had no proof without resorting to dismantling the thing, which would have been daft to say the least, considering the forces involved, but when one thought about it, what more perfect complement was there to Unicorn hair? It symbolised life and light, and was very, very hard to come by. Just like the Elixir. What really gave me the clue was the fact that Dumbledore let slip that Nicholas Flamel was – still – alive and well. Clearing up a six-hundred and sixty-six year-old estate takes time, apparently. I don't think that he'd quite realised that even his coffee grinder had become a collectable antique. One way or another, I suspected that the three had been communicating for quite a while on the subject of the core.

And the shell? Oh, he's _good_, is Mr Ollivander. Really quite a superb wandmaker. With all that magical force pent up inside, it would have been far too easy to blow the wand up like a stick of nuclear dynamite by setting the wooden shell on fire. So he made it out of something else.

He made it, not out of diamond, for that substance has a tendency to shatter in a very strong magical field, but of pure, compressed, _wrought_ carbon. If you could make graphite as hard as diamond without actually ending up with the said gem, you'd get this. It was as black as infinity, and the grain of the carbon layers being of course perfectly aligned due to the unique nature of the material, it conducted magic with a resistance bordering on nil. It wasn't indestructible, no wand was - but it was very, very tough. As it had to be, considering the vast store of energy concentrated inside.

Balancing the magical attributes had been a complete pain, as far as I could tell. Only perfect complements and opposites were of any use in a dual-core, and one small mistake in quantity, type, quality or method of combination of the two core substances usually resulted, upon the first spell being cast, in a rather large bang and a lot less wizard. Well, a more spread out one at that. Certainly one less dense than he had been a moment before, at any rate. Literally.

Pity we didn't think to use Lockhart as a tester, really.

And this gave me an idea. It was utterly, utterly insane. It was totally unexpected. If it hadn't been for my raging yet somehow utterly cool and disembodied state of mind I might just have stopped, thought about it and carried on fighting normally. And eventually lost.

There are many versions of what happened in there, including the one about me bashing him over the head with a rock _accio'd_ from behind him. I had to admit that that one had merits, as did the one involving conjured mirrors, three Avadas and lots of angles, but this is what _really_ happened.

During a microscopic lull in my shields, I let him disarm me, and he, utterly surprised, unable to conceal a look of sheer triumph on his snakelike face, caught the wand and prepared to fire another Avada.

Just as I, still armed with my old wand hidden up my sleeve, of my own free will, and most importantly not involving him in _any way at all_, turned, ran onto the podium, and dove.

Straight through the veil.

-

The world went black.

The world went white.

There were voices.

One said: We were not expecting this.

One said: It was a clever move.

One said: He cannot stay.

One said: He has played by the Rules. He is cunning.

One said: He will be returned.

One said: We will be waiting.

There was utter silence. Then :

One said: Good luck.

I hit grey stone and freezing dust on the other side of the ragged veil just as Riddle was walking triumphantly out of the room, wands at his side ready to go forth and conquer, or whatever it is that megalomaniacs do. My breath was forced from my lungs as I skidded off the podium and crashed into the wall, shaking every bone in my body. I had dived in at a slight angle, so as to be able to see past the pillars on the other side once I was through.

Yes, you heard me right. One I was through.

_Each must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives. _That had been my plan all along. I could not die unless Riddle specifically killed me. Suicide was therefore impossible.

_He didn't know about that bit_. He thought I was dead, consumed by the veil in a foolish and pathetic attempt at controlling at the last the life he so dearly wanted to take from me.

So, when I hit the back wall of the chamber with a crash, it was the most natural thing in the world for Riddle to turn around and raise his guard to fire in shock at the impossibility of it all. He was holding the dual-core in his left hand, the ebony shining dully as it swung up and around along a path parallel to his real wand.

He was far too late, far too slow, and he knew it. He hadn't gone through half the turn when my Reductor curse left my wand tip and tore a sizzling red line through the air. Simultaneously I ducked back behind the cover of the veil, just managing to see the curse hit the dual-core dead on as Riddle tried to swing his real wand across to intercept, counting on a _Priori Incantatem _to save him. He never finished the movement.

Ollivander's graphite shell was very good at conducting magic. _Both ways._ So when the curse hit the tip, it travelled straight through and smashed into the layered core, fusing the elements together into an unstable magical mass. Just as I'd planned.

The dual-core exploded with a colossal bang, taking Riddle's own wand with it a microsecond later. Even protected as I was behind the fabric of the veil, the shockwave still smashed me, blinded by the glare, into the back wall a second time head first. My skull was pounding with pain, and it was several seconds before I could see straight.

Carnage greeted my eyes. A wide, shallow stone bowl had been blown out of the wall and floor opposite me along with the door, the debris littering the chamber with chunks of partially-dressed stone and splinters as dust filled the room. Of Riddle, there was nothing left save a few tattered robe fragments and the appalling stench of burnt flesh and silicon. Next to me, the veil rippled a little more strongly than normal, as if something had just gone through. I would not have been surprised to hear a scream of "_Potter!_" come tearing from it like a curse. But of course it didn't.

I got to my feet, shaking. With a nod to the veil, stepping carefully over the fragments of smoking rock and wood, I left, trying very hard not to think at all. Behind me, nothing stirred.

There was light. He was terrified of it.

One said: You tried to cheat us.

One said: You have failed.

And then there was darkness.


End file.
